Say beans

Feeling super-inspired this morning by Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life, recommended to me by Peggy. I am so enjoying the place the book puts me, in this dreamy exaltation of what a garden can do. And truly I agree with Joan, that a house is just a house while a garden is so much greater.

Vegetable gardens...are much more important than houses in the overall scheme of things.  Agriculture is the foundation of civilization.  Houses comes and go, but soil must be cherished if food is to be grown for us to eat.
     So if I expressed more concern about whether we could grow sweet potatoes without wireworm holes than about whether we had to tear down our house, it is because the house represented nothing but time, money, work, and disappointment, while sweet potatoes -- and the garden as a whole -- had come to symbolize long-term survival.

Heading into the garden now, to stare and think and start more kale, watch bees in flight, generally consider questions of long-term survival and joy and food. And think about this quote that Joan uses to begin Chapter 4:

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thoughts in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wordwood and piper and millet grass, making this earth say beans instead of grass -- this was my daily work.                                     --  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

My thing for the circus

Joe and I went to the circus last night, a little tiny mom-and-pop-type circus, a fundraiser by a local Lions club.  We last went to see such a circus in 2005, when The Kid was still a junior in high school, and I loved it.  That little circus blew me away completely, in fact.  I so hadn't expected to see trapeze artists, bicycles on high-wires, motorcycles in the aptly named Ball of Death.  It was a family affair, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, all working together.  And so low-key.  The performers worked the ticket booth, did their number, said good-bye to you at the exits.  It seemed like a piece of another time, really, so homegrown and a little bit funky.  Also, there were no tigers, lions, elephants, or monkeys -- phew -- so no worries or thoughts about their treatment.  Wait, there was an elephant, the smallest elephant in the world in fact, something so adorable that I was willing to check out a totally unknown and nowhere-near-as-good circus last night on the off-chance that I'd see that number again.

And fortunately, I did.

Which is a really good thing because last night's was the worst circus I have ever seen.  Now, I haven't seen a HUGE number of circuses, but as a child, before we moved into the Castro in San Francisco, we lived in Daly City perched above the Cow Palace.  On at least one occasion, we watched the pachyderm parade, a Ringling Brothers tradition when they arrive in a town and something which made a huge impression on me.  I remember not being comfortable at the circus itself with the elephant act -- something just so wrong about such a huge animal standing on its head, but it was such a thrill to see those great creatures just walking down the middle of the street, linked trunk-to-tail-to-trunk.  It still makes me happy to think about it.

I loved the circus as a kid (except for the parts, as above, that made me uncomfortable).  For years, I had Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey posters on the walls of my room, posters pulled out of the program that my parents bought me at a show.  I remember a tiger poster, and another of women with gold rings stacked around their thoats to stretch their necks longer.  I stared at those posters and dreamed of the circus for hours and years.

It's funny that The Kid has a circus thing, too (or maybe not that surprising).  We were both stoked one Sunday about a year ago to find ourselves at a booth at the Alameda Flea Market that was just packed with circus memorabilia, vintage photos of performers and elephants and circus life.  Any book that comes out about circus, I'll consume.  Any show on tv, same.

Naturally, nowadays the whole subject of circus is much more difficult. When Ringling Brothers was performing in Oakland recently, I didn't go -- even though I really, really wanted to go, because I love the circus.  But I also love animals, and the thought of elephants or big cats being mistreated just makes me ill.  I can't be a part of it.  But because I knew this little circus couldn't possibly get a permit if there was any question of animal abuse (thanks to the rigorous standards of the Marin Humane Society), off we went.

And even though it was truly the worst circus ever, I had a great time.  There were still some moments of absolute delight, even from a very bad clown who over-used the whistle in his mouth.  Children around us were beside themselves, laughing uncontrollably, swept up even in the terrible magic act.  Even if the tricks were lame, the magic was still happening, judging from the children's reactions.  It was priceless.  There was one boy in a red jacket sitting near us, who was just absolutely killing me with his reactions -- just so cute I could barely stand it.  One performer at least, Luigi the Clown, was head and shoulders above the rest in the troupe.  Truly a professional.  He did one bit where he was trying to move a suitcase which remained immovable in mid-air, that was just perfect.

How could I love it so much when it was just so bad?  Since last night, I've been pondering this, and where this love of circus comes from, and I think I've got it.  The best circuses have this, and apparently the worst have it, too, in smaller quantities.

Circus acts all seem to say, "Look what I can do!"  And by extension, to everyone in the audience, "look what YOU can do." Whether it's the trapeze, the high wire, the clown, yes, even the lion tamer, there's a switch that takes place.  When the aerialist climbs up to that tiny platform in her fishnets and waves to the crowd before jumping into the air, leaping for the bar, my palms are sweating because it's ME I see up there.  When the acrobat is on the wire, I hold my breath, feeling every motion as if I were the one traveling gracefully through thin air, a long thin bar or a parasol in my hand.  Circus seems to demonstrate all of the crazy potential we have to defy gravity, fear, self-consciousness and bust out in spectacular ways.  When I see circus, even when it's not so good, I am still delighted with the demonstration, however imperfect, of how far we can stretch and reach and express. Of what a treat it is to be embodied, to have these limbs and hearts and laughs.

I'll try not to miss these little circuses when they pass through ever again.  I get a kick out of these performances that I honestly don't get from anything else -- this high feeling of wow, check that out, look at what we're capable of!  And honestly, who doesn't sometimes need to laugh like a kid at something really silly, or fall in love again with a tiny, tiny elephant.

XX

Kale: what the heck?

In the past five months, I've eaten more kale than in my entire life combined.  It started with tasting kale chips from Whole Paycheck, at which point I declared them a sick, cruel joke perpetrated on vegans.  And not cheap, either.  However, and thankfully, the lovely Danielle made them for us on a girls' weekend in Tahoe in January, and I've been hooked ever since.  And then we had the Kale Caesar at Peggy's and that put us over the moon.

As a result we planted two varieties in  the garden this year: Russian and Dinosaur.

Friday night we harvested outer leaves for the first time and made kale chips for dinner guests.  Declared by one to be the very best kale chips she'd ever had.  And she knows from kale chips, so that was intended as a compliment.

But here's what I want to say about kale.

It's an amazing plant.  Check this out.  It appears to grow new leaves wherever there's a cut in an existing leaf.  I mean, look at the evidence.  Isn't that what it looks like?

Kale is, according to what I'm reading, a super-food, cancer-fighting, DNA repairing, calcium containing -- in short, amazing!  Thrives in not-hot weather, which could mean that I could keep it going pretty much year-round, in a bed, like it is now, with lettuce and radishes.

So grateful to have been fed kale in January, so that now, on the brink of June, I have done the "work" to ensure home harvests for the next few months. 

Delicious!

Where have I been?

If I'm being perfectly honest, I have spent most of the last week utterly convinced I was pregnant.  Seriously.  Convinced.

Go ahead and snort, laugh, whatever you need to do.  But the signs were all lined up. Period late, that Human Hindenberg feeling, completely fuzzy-brained every single day, super-sore lumpy boobs (so unattractive, right?), the sweating, the ravenous appetite followed by nausea, so tired, and a creepy, twisty unmistakable Something happening in the uterus.

Disgusting.

The week before I was convinced that my thyroid was crashing.  I just had *nothing*, no energy, no brain power.  Just kind of a sad dullness.  Yes, I am still utterly heart-broken about Jasper, but this was beyond that, like the way the Dementors just suck all of the joy out of everything, or the Specters in the Dark Materials trilogy.

But a thyroid test revealed no change, really, from a test two years ago.  And still I felt like total crap.  In fact, I felt like more crap, sleeping way more than is normal, especially for someone like me, sleeping straight through from 8 pm to 5 am, so uncharacteristic.

From this, naturally the idea of pregnancy took hold, facilitated by the two-weeks-late period and the litany of woes enumerated above.  I emailed my doctor with my desperate plea, "Pregnancy or menopause?"  He promptly ordered me up the two tests, I stopped for a chat with a phlebotomist at Kaiser (they always need to talk to me about tattoos, go figure), and here we are.

According to the interwebs, yes, it's entirely possible for a vasectomy to fail after 20 years.  In my hormone-addled state, I also concocted a whole notion that the burst of new cell growth that Joe experienced following the end of his chemo had *of course* reversed the effects of that long-ago snip, knitted back together that severed vas deferens.  

More than that, I had the whole story of an abortion at age 48 pretty much written out in my head.  As usual, no matter what happens, that's the thought that runs through my mind: that it'll make a good story.  No matter what.  Momentarily, I entertained the thought that, given all of the women I know who have struggled through all of that bullshit in-vitro fertilization in their expensive attempts to carry pregnancies, that I should carry the thing and give it to someone? Was it selfish not to share it, freecycle it so to speak?

Yes, that was some crazy shit.

But naturally, as things go, I was in the bathroom when the email came, announcing that I had new lab results to review. In the bathroom delighting at the sight of blood and the feeling of let-down, yes, hurray, that I would finally get my body back and stop feeling like an idiot.

As for the menopause test, I'll have to wait for my doctor to interpret the results. I'm an ignoramus about that next part of the journey in this body, but eager to learn more, to experience it, if only to tell the story.

XX

Renewing my vows, post-Apocalypse Not

We went to some friends' block party in Mill Valley last night and thoroughly enjoyed the hang-out. I was so reminded of the countless block parties on Liberty Street, where I grew up, and that easy companionship of neighbors. That sitting around in the street under the stars, laughing, playing, running around.  We have great neighbors on each side where we live now, but nothing like what we saw last night, nothing like what I grew up with.  It was sweet, indeed, to be there, to see that normalcy, kids on skateboards, adults at the grill -- just like old times.

I've realized a few things this morning, probably because I am not feeling 100%, feeling fuzzy actually, my hormones a little nutty, a migraine just off the coast of my awareness.

One is that this year has been challenging so far, really.  I feel like I've suffered a number of disappointments and sorrows, the biggest of which was of course losing Jasper.  I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was looking out the window of our home office, into the garden, and Jasper walked past, sniffing stuff.  I woke myself up with the force of my sharp intake of breath at seeing him, knowing even in dream that it wasn't so, then so sad upon waking that I hadn't just let it ride, kept watching him in dream as I can no longer do in life.  So that's sad.  There've been a number of other smaller things -- Joe's accident, some realizations about people that bummed me out -- but anyway, because I'm a little low today physically, stuff is floating to the surface.

Post-Rapture, the vows I'm renewing have nothing to do with my husband.  I feel like our vows get renewed every single day.  He makes me laugh pretty much every morning when I wake up, not long after I open my eyes, something which is so amazing and great. He is just cleverer, funnier, cuter all the time.  Our Us just never gets old.  Just gets better.

No, instead, I'm renewing my vows to myself, to take care of myself the way I know I need to, to manufacture little delights for myself (and others) that make everything tastier and better.  Here is how this is manifesting:

- I can't stay out late anymore.  I was up way too late last night, which is definitely contributing to my feeling-weird this morning.  I need to admit once and for all that I really can't operate that way.  It's generally impossible for me to sleep past 6am, especially in the summer, and the price for being out til midnight or later is just too high.  Can't pay it anymore.  So even though it makes me super-boring and it means taking separate cars so that Joe can stay as long as he likes, I need to start holding that line for myself, cutting out and observing my bedtime.  It's a little disappointing, but really feels like that would be the smarter thing to do, instead of pretending that I am both early bird and night owl.  Nope, one bird only, the early kind.

- I can drink my coffee with whole cream -- yes, whipping cream -- whenever possible.  Something magical happens in the cup, the way the fat in the cream bonds with the oils in the coffee -- the result is absolutely delicious.  I knew this, since it's one of my Christmas time rituals to have toasted panettone for breakfast and a spoonful of whole cream in my coffee, but I think it's time to stretch the coffee part of that habit out to the rest of the year.  Comparing the calories, it's really not such a big deal, since I definitely use more half-and-half than I do cream.  And damn it, the result is excellent.

- I am happier when there are homebaked, homecooked goodies at my house.  I'm writing this right now as  5 1/2 T of unsalted butter are softening on the counter, so I can launch my morning's creation: banana bread with a swirl of Nutella.  [Nutella is a whole vow unto itself.]  Later it'll be something else, after our lunch guests leave and before dinner guests arrive.  But really, this is something so necessary to me right now, this knowing that there are tasty options, a way to savor the beauty of this life, in the kitchen.  And with the garden exploding already -- lettuce, kale, cilantro, always cilantro -- there is so much freshness to enjoy.

So, nothing earthshaking on this first post-Rapture morning, really.  Just my own self in the quiet of this funny morning, baking, moving slowly, enjoying.

Hmm, and maybe not...

This is the post I submitted to San Rafael Patch this morning, assuming they'd approve it and up it would go, like the last 2.  But now it's been 15 hours and I suspect it won't be approved, for some reason still unknown to me.  Oh wellies, here it is. Those who read me a couple of days ago will recognize some of it, but I did expand just for Patch purposes.  

As I write this, we stand on the brink – so we’re told – of apocalypse.  Yes, on May 21^st, 2011, Jesus returns.  If you’re a believer, you’re good.  If you’re not, you’re hosed.  Saved Christian souls will go straight to heaven, the rest of us are in for a few months of fiery misery before the world comes to a complete end on October 21, 2011. 

Apparently, thousands of people, listeners to Harold Camping’s Family Radio, are ready.  They've already given away their possessions, stopped paying their bills and mortgages, gone to confession or otherwise made peace with their god, and are just hanging out now waiting for the Second Coming, currently scheduled for 6:00 pm PDT. 

Me: I’m going to BevMo and picking up a few bottles of champagne.  I will be celebrating all weekend, celebrating the beauty of the world we live in and the extraordinary gift it is to be alive right now.  The Apocalypse?  More like the A-not-alypse.

Because nothing is going to happen.

We’ll all wake up Sunday, May 22^nd, just like always.  I’ll open my eyes like I always do, take in the sight of the redwood trees in my neighbor’s yard, marvel at their size and grace and stunning good looks, and get up, get caffeinated and get on with life.

And have a mimosa.  OK, I'll go to yoga first, but then I'll have a mimosa.

Here’s what I’ll be toasting: That we’re still here, on this gorgeous rock.  That this place we’re in, this life we have, is what we get – this is it.  Yes, sometimes it may be hard, sometimes it may be awful, but in the midst of all of that, our hearts still beat, birds still sing, the sun rises and the sun sets.  And rises.

I'll be raising my glass and toasting the end of Apocalypse itself -- may this failed prediction open the eyes of those who believed in it.  May this be an end to fear, to wishing for some reality other than the one we're in, which is, as much as it sometimes can suck, perfect, beautiful, divine. It is, in a word, Heaven.  Right here and right now. 

Maybe that's too much to wish for, but since we're going to be here for a while, why not?  There's time.

Making stars

I am thoroughly enjoying "Packing for Mars" by Mary Roach. Blasting off into the cosmos with Mary is exactly what I need right now, and it -- funny how that happens -- goes along so well with some themes that have emerged in yoga in recent weeks.  Here is what is striking me this morning:

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place.  It is practically God.  In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases.  Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced.  These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

This is precisely how yoga has been feeling lately, that we could all be these individual particles blowing past each other in space, but somehow the practice exerts a pull on some of us and then those some of us exert a pull on others of us, until -- bam! -- a star is formed, kula is born.  And though we disperse, the gravitational attraction remains and we form and re-form, in the same pattern, over and over.

Naturally, I think I am using my will to arrive at the right place, right time, but from there, something else is in charge, I swear it.  Something beyond will. There's this sense at the start of class of acceleration, then lift-off, like some unseen force is kicking in, something beyond me or the other particles in the room, and boom, off we go into a delectable spin.

I feel like I might be talking a little crazy for some of you, but that's OK.  It sometimes feels a little crazy -- ok, sometimes downright spooky -- to be inside this sensation, inside it repeatedly.  

There's something truly delicious about it, as though we're participating over and over in the creation and expansion of the cosmos itself, as delirious as that sounds.  But it's truly miraculous, and fun, and satisfyingly challenging.

In that context, it's funny to read about people actually packing for space, training for weightlessness and life in a capsule orbiting the planet.  From where I sit this morning, it's crystal clear that for lift-off no NASA required.  To experience the euphoria of space, it just takes that bumping of particles into form -- you and your friends, on the mat, again.